Sunburn (Book 1, The Events Trilogy)

by Gorvine, Samuel

  Copyright 2014 Samuel Gorvine

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  SUNBURN: Book 1, the Event Trilogy

  The Event

  A novel by

  Samuel Gorvine

  Also by Samuel Gorvine:

  The Wanderer

  The Cowboy from Connemara

  Killing Chavez

  Forbidden!

  Crime and Punishment: a Modern Tale

  Brazil Blog

  Translations:

  Loud and Clear

  1.

  In the West of the State of Amazonas in Brazil, equidistant between the borders of Venezuela and Peru, a man called Billas stood on the bank of a river. He called it “the River” as it was the only one he knew of and he didn’t know he lived in Brazil or that there were other people beside his own in the world. For him there was only “upstream” and “downstream” along the oxbow where the Village was and the patch of jungle where his People had always lived.

  The man with skin the color of a fish’s belly who had come talking strangely last month in a canoe without paddles, was the first evidence that they were not alone. His son had called out,

  “Look, Father, look! There is meat on the River!”

  The People got into their dugout canoes and went out to get the fish-belly man. They speared him easily, brought him home, cooked and ate him, and made a nice planter from his skull. The big black book he brought and the wooden cross about his waist they threw in the River and watched them disappear downstream into the next world.

  Billas, who was the shaman of his people, had approved of all this but his powers told him that things were now out of balance in the world and that something bad was going to happen. He was upset and couldn’t say why. Was it the fish-belly man’s fault? He had dreamed of blood in the night sky—now the Sun peered at him angrily through the leaves of the trees across the River.

  Will Fisher loved the view from the deck of his home on a hillside in Paw Paw, West Virginia. The distant hills and mountain sides in his view held no sign of human habitation. At night no lights showed in the blackness of the hillsides. The landscape looked much as it had in colonial times or during the War Between the States when West Virginia had separated from Virginia. His home was small but well built, mostly by himself, with only the plumbing and electric work done by contractors. His shelter was a special room built into the hillside behind the house.

  He had been born into an Amish family in Lancaster County PA, but had left as a teenager and never looked back. He wanted to learn and see the world, exactly the opposite orientation that Amish culture had tried to foster in him. In truth they had been glad to see the back of him, and be free of all his unsettling questions about absolutely everything. They had not known how to deal with him. Will had worked hard and got money together for his education and later become part of an IT startup in Massachusetts that did very well. When Google bought the company his small share bought with sweat equity translated into serious money and he was able to retire early and live alone, without anyone to tell him what to do.

  But, his early upbringing left him spiritually at an impasse, lost between the radical fundamentalism of a fundamentalist German sect which had arrived in America in the eighteenth century and the realities of the modern world. Living alone, he thought a lot about God’s wrath and the end of the world. By the time the Event occurred Will had been awaiting some terrible occurrence for quite a while. He couldn’t explain exactly how it was going to happen if you asked him.

  He was not a racist or anti-Semite like some others in the Survivalist movement. He didn’t believe as some did that armies of Negroes or Zionists were coming to take his guns away. But he was sure Something was coming—had been for a long time, unlike Billas who had come to believe that only after they ate the missionary. Now hearing about the coming coronal mass ejection, Will was beginning to wonder if the Amish Elders and his father had been right all along--

  Will was prepared. His shelter was filled with well-selected food and gear recommended by his survivalist magazines as well as several firearms, including his favorite, a Mossberg 500SP 12 gauge. He would nap sometimes in the shelter on a canvas cot and switch the power over from the house to the shelter just to feel how it would be and to check that everything was working okay. There was an array of solar collectors on the roof of the house that could power everything except induction motors, but he was connected to the grid and could use Virginia Power and Light’s electricity if he wanted. A simple switch connected to the controller routed the array power from the house to the shelter. The deep cycle batteries held three days of energy for when there was no sun.

  He liked trail biking along the hunting trail and narrow roads of the West Virginia hills and had a classic Honda CT250S that he rode at least once a week over in the direction of Paw Paw.

  “Okay. Bring it,” he thought, looking out over the valley. “I’m ready.”

  A family of mule deer had come up to the salt lick below the house, but they were used to seeing Will and even the fawns weren’t afraid of him.

  “Whatever comes, I’m ready!” he said to the deer, who looked up at him, their long ears moving this way and that, and went back to licking the salt.

  In the end they had less than two days warning before the Event. Dr. Fred Goodman, a 40 year old scientist, sat at his home office desk in College Park, Maryland and looked at the data appearing on his 40 inch monitor. He had become a scientist with money he had earned as a reserve officer in the Army and with their college assistance programs he had gotten into a mid-level school and done so well that he was admitted with a full scholarship to Virginia Tech in physics. His job now was studying the corona of the Sun which was now preparing to let go a little fart, a bit of nothing that the Sun himself would not miss, but it would clear the decks here on earth—oh, yes! The data was coming in from Caltech Solar Laboratory in San Diego where he was a consultant. When several of the darker sunspots on the sun’s face merged together, he pulled up Skype on his small monitor and clicked on the icon for his boss at CSL.

  When Richard Gordon’s face appeared Fred didn’t waste time on small talk.

  “Have you seen these data, Richard? Are we about to have the worst coronal expulsion event ever?” he asked, his voice quavering slightly.

  “I’ve seen the data. We had a staff meeting and Rachel Rosen was patched in on Skype from Israel—“

  “Why didn’t you Skype me too?”

  “Sorry, but you were offline. Don’t worry; you didn’t miss anything, though you may wish you had.”

  “Has anything actually happened yet?”

  “No, and that’s what’s so worrisome— it seems to be building up even more pressure with heavy coronal waves converging on the merging sunspots---it just keeps growing and building—when it finally lets go--”

  Dr. Rachel Rosen had had a different opinion than her colleagues at the meeting. She thought it was going to be much worse they did.

  “It’s over,” she had told them. “We are fucking toast! The whole world! This is just terrible--”

  She had sounded funny swearing in English, this tiny elegant woman with her throaty Israeli accent. But nobody laughed.

  “Take it
easy, Dr. Rosen,” Gordon had tut-tutted nervously. “Nothing has actually happened yet.”

  Later, Rachel Rosen was driving from Beersheba in the South of Israel, where her Lab was, to her childhood home, Jerusalem.

  She wanted to talk to the rabbis at the Western Wall—ask them why God was breaking His promise not to destroy humanity again. Rosen was an observant Jew, and also a scientist who felt that science and religion were not mutually exclusive ideas but simply different ways of looking at the complexity of the world.

  She wiped her face and turned the AC higher. It was hot! Dog days of August in Israel. It would be a September like no other, she was sure. She stopped at a supermarket and filled her trunk and back seat with loaves of black bread, the staple combat ration of the Israeli Army, as well as jars of jam and lots and lots of canned goods.

  2.

  “What are you trying to say exactly, Fred?” his wife, Lena, wanted to know. Her brow was knit with concern as they set the table for dinner. The noise of their two small boys could be heard from their rooms upstairs.

  “It looks like we are going to have a Coronal Mass Ejection—a massive geomagnetic storm. The biggest one ever, perhaps.”

  Lily had a mathematics degree from Boston College and knew her husband’s work, in a general way. Sometimes he would have her check his calculations or listen to a theory to see if he was making sense.

  “Wasn’t there something like that during the Civil War?”

  “Just before. September 1, 1859 to be exact. An English astronomer named Carrington tracked it and published a report. At the time, there were only the telegraph exchanges that could be really affected. There was no electric grid yet—“

  “So, what happened to the telegraph system?” she asked.

  “Some of the telegraph instruments burst into flames and the wiring was burnt. Otherwise there was nothing else around to be damaged. It was all still very primitive. They disconnected some instruments from the batteries, the ones that still were functioning, and there was so much electricity in the air they worked unconnected to any source of power. Oh, and there was a hell of a light show.”

  “What?”

  “You could see the aurora borealis over Miami, Madrid, Tokyo—“

  “And this one will be worse, you think?”

  “Rosen from Beersheva Labs says it might be more than twice as bad as the Carrington Event— maybe up to X90--“

  “Oh, come on! You always said she was a bit of a nervous nelly—”

  “I did say that, but she’s still a good scientist. She sees the big picture and I trust her judgment. If she is afraid then we should be afraid. X90 is double what has ever been seen in historical memory; the Sun’s ready to reverse polarity on its south pole as it’s already done in the north. We are also at Solar Max in the eleven year cycle. All of this is occurring together for the first time in the history of modern solar observations. It could be quite a shit storm--”

  “And what will it mean for us?”

  “My worst fears is that the loss overnight of our digital world upon which we depend so much without even thinking how fragile it all is—that this event will crack the veneer of civilization in the West. In places where development hasn’t occurred, probably nothing much will change.”

  “But what does that mean exactly, ‘the veneer of civilization bla bla bla,’ with all the wars and butchery of the modern world, where is this civilization you’re talking about?”

  “Civilization is that we get our news over the computer and TV, we cook our bacon and eggs over a controlled flame and we go to work, our salaries are wired to our bank accounts and the pieces of worthless paper we get at the bank are agreed to be worth something. We eat bread and hamburgers and duck l’orange and not each other.”

  “So if we refrain from cannibalism we’re civilized?”

  “Hey, don’t knock it—“

  After Lena went to work Fred sat alone finishing his breakfast. He watched the news on Cable TV and listened as the coffeemaker burbled its last. The coffee was ready. How could he do without his coffeemaker, the laptop open in front of him where he did his work, the TV to bring him entertainment, the electric range to roast his meat and fry his eggs? How would he get to work without his car and talk to his colleagues without a telephone or a cell? He stopped munching his toast as it really hit him what might be coming.

  Lena, as she reached her office was still thinking about the conversation with Fred as she sat down to review data from reports before the patient arrived. She was one of the best radiologists in the Washington area with a specialty in mammography. She was early and her receptionist was making coffee.

  They greeted each other in the usual way and Lena passed down the hall back to her office where she sat with patients and showed them the results of their tests, good or bad.

  Was it possible that I a few days all these beautiful machines with the power to visualize the whole of the human body, down to the tiniest detail would become big clumps of scrap metal and plastic? Would the most powerful diagnostic tool once again be the stethoscope? How she be a professional, work in such a world as that? She had no illusions about herself, her strengths, her weaknesses. To friends and family she would say, “I’m not a doctor, I’m a photographer.” And she meant it too. She was a damn good photographer, but these million dollar cameras, and cameras they were no matter what the wave length they used, depended completely on a reliable supply of electricity and the most revolutionary invention of the past generation, the Internet.

  How could she practice medicine as they had in the time of George Washington? She decided Fred was overreacting, as usual. His vision of humanity returning to its most primitive state, swinging through the trees with a chunk of bloody meat in hand would not come to pass. It couldn’t, could it?

  3.

  There was silence at the CSOL observation room in California a few days later when they saw the actual Ejection Event occurring. Fred Goodman had flown in from the east coast and was sitting with his colleagues watching the green bubble spill out from the luminous fire of the Sun`s corona. Rosen`s face filled the Skype screen, her mouth open slightly.

  “God in heaven!” someone whispered.

  “Well, Richard?” Fred asked his Boss, quietly.

  Richard didn’t want to say what he was thinking.

  “Dr. Rosen?” he passed the ball instead.

  They all sat riveted watching the bubble grow and change into something almost alive, malevolent, coming at them like a green slime monster from a horror movie.

  “Dr. Rosen?” Louder this time, but she still didn`t reply.

  They turned from the big screen to see that Dr. Rosen had changed modalities on them. She had put on a dark blue scarf over her hair and was rocking gently and praying in Hebrew from a small book. It had a pleasant singsong quality to it, like monks chanting, Fred thought. There was no need for Dr. Rosen to say what she thought was in their future.

  “Fred?” Richard asked.

  “What do you want me to say? Biggest CME ever? Will produce the greatest ever light show when it arrives? Like Rosen said the other day, ‘we`re all fucked! ` Is that what you want me to say?”

  “How about something useful—“

  “Ah, well. Ok. Useful? Well, how about this, `in a few days we`re all going back to the eighteenth century. Nothing electric, nothing digital is going to work for years, if ever. But let`s see, back then people knew how to live without electricity, how to build a fire, rig a horse and wagon, weave cloth, forge steel, have a baby-- all without electricity. So in a in few months, maybe, just maybe, we might have the capacity to make bronze, make cloth with a spinning wheel, deliver a baby by candlelight, if we can find anyone who still knows the old ways to do things that people knew 200 years ago!`”

  “We don’t know for sure it’s going to be that bad,” said one of other lab scientists. “It could be only X20 to 40—“

  “Sure, or it could be a little better than X90, or even much
worse. Just look at the size of that CME. Did you ever in your worst nightmares see anything like that coming towards our Earth?”

  Nobody had an answer for that. They looked again at the thing on the big screen. It was like looking down the muzzle of a loaded shotgun. It was hard to see any way out of this. They could see Rosen ending a call on her cell phone. She had stopped praying and taken some action.

  “I just got off the phone with the Secretary of Defense here in Israel. He is going to recommend to the Prime Minister that Israel start immediately to power down our electric grid. It will take more than a day here, even for our little one, and you should do the same there in the USA.”

  “You mean call Washington and have them shut down the whole grid?”

  “Of course. This way something may be saved for the future. If it is running when the CME hits it will all be completely ruined. Those generators are difficult to build and cost a fortune.”

  “I’m not sure they will believe us—“

  “You have to try,” Rosen insisted. “Call NOAA first—they must be tracking this too, and in the meantime I will speak to my friend the Israeli Defense Minister again and have him call his counterpart at the White House. Maybe that will help.”

  “Good idea,” said Fred. “The USA is a big country and none of us here has friends in the Cabinet,” he said a bit sarcastically, regretting it immediately. Rosen had just been trying to help.

  “They must act quickly,” she went on. “Can we get an eta on exactly when it will hit us and how the magnetic lines will line up? That will make a difference too.”

  “I’m taking the red-eye back east tonight,” declared Fred, getting up and putting papers and his notebook computer into his briefcase. “I need to be with my family!”

  Everyone seemed lost for a moment in his own thoughts and no one said a word as he left.